Formation and Malformation: Why Catechesis Isn’t Enough if the Liturgy is Countercatechetical

In many discussions online, I have encountered versions of the view that we should not be “fussy” about liturgy, because as long as we are attending a Catholic rite, and we are sincere in our intentions, we will be led to God. Those who hold this view fail to recognize, however, that bad liturgy damages the spiritual lives of the faithful; it actually sets them back. A letter I received some time ago from a friend really brought this out, and I share it now with NLM readers, along with my briefer reply.

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

I’ve been reflecting on the idea of malformation in the liturgy. What is the effect (if it can even be measured) of the liturgy of the past 50 years on the faithful? Specifically, in the way that it has formed us (or malformed us)?

Reflecting on this, I realize that I first thought of this problem about seven years ago. I can still picture myself driving in the car listening to Catholic Answers. The new translation of the Missal had just been issued and the host was discussing the repetition of “through my fault” in the Confiteor. I believe the caller was troubled by an “overemphasis on sin.” The host was lamenting a “loss of the sense of sin” in our culture.

However, as I listened (and I had not studied the liturgy at all), I couldn’t help but think that the liturgy itself, in the old ICEL translation, had itself downplayed the sense of sin (at the time, I didn’t know that this was more than just the translation, but was also the fact that the Consilium deliberately removed this type of language from the Missal). And so, I found myself actually somewhat upset with the host. His caller probably wasn’t a “now-and-again Catholic”; most likely, this was someone who had attended Mass faithfully over the past several decades. Part of the reason this person had lost the “sense of sin” wasn’t just “the culture,” but was the fact that the liturgy itself fails to adequately convey this.

I’ve worked in faith formation in a variety of roles over the past several years. We were always lamenting the “failures in catechesis” regarding things like sin, the Mass as Sacrifice, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, marriage, the importance of Confession, the reality of hell. We thought all we needed to do was to teach people about these things and to explain their meaning and importance, developing programs and faith formation series, making more resources available, getting priests to talk more about them in homilies.

While all of those endeavors are certainly helpful, what we failed to comprehend was that the liturgy itself was working against us. Week after week, the average Catholic’s experience of the liturgy was malforming them in all these areas. And this is something, it seems to me, that catechesis can never overcome. Catechesis, the lex credendi, should flow out of liturgy, the lex orandi. I can remember a relative of mine—a very faithful man, and something of a “postconciliar exile”—being so struck by John Paul II’s Ecclesia de Eucharistia. He would say again and again that at the Mass, we are at Calvary. Years later, I realized that when I’m at the TLM, it actually feels like I’m there at the Cross. At the NO, I have to direct my intention and make a greater effort to be mindful of what’s taking place on the altar.

Another common thing I’ve heard in discussions of evangelization is the fact that “only 5–7% of people in the pews are evangelized.” What I always thought about this was that we need to have different in-parish evangelization programs to help these people understand what it means to have a personal relationship with Jesus. We have to understand the “thresholds of conversion” (Sherry Weddell) and help guide people through them to the place of “intentional discipleship.” Then they will be ready and in a position to benefit from the Mass.

While there is probably some truth to this, my thinking is starting to shift in this area as well. If these people are at Mass, presumably they have some faith, some relationship with Christ. What if it’s been the liturgy that has actually been an obstacle to them deepening this relationship? What if they have actually gone backwards in their journey, because they are not being drawn into a deeper encounter with mystery and a richness of prayer? I don’t think we’ve sufficiently considered this as a real possibility as we try to find “solutions” to these problems. Generally the thinking seems to be that these people won’t “get anything out of the Mass” until they are evangelized and have a personal relationship with Christ. But isn’t the liturgy the very place where this relationship is fed? What about situations where the liturgy does not instill the habits that allow us to grow closer to Him?
 

In my own life, I see this struggle especially with the Liturgy of the Hours. I have prayed the LOTH on and off for about fifteen years. Lately, however, I’ve been using either the Roman Breviary or, more recently, the Anglican Use Office (which allows for the continuous reading of the whole psalter over the course of a month). I notice that I’m actually formed differently. Using the Anglican Use Office, I’ve been going through all 150 psalms, with no omitted verses. It conveys a very different sense of God, of myself, of what I should ask for in prayer, than the LOTH does. I guess my point is that even if someone is immersed in the new Mass and the LOTH, they aren’t going to get a lot of those things that we (from the “faith formation” perspective) most want them to get: the sense of sin, the importance of penance/fasting, a deepening immersion in the liturgical year, the Mass as Sacrifice, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the uniqueness of the ordained priesthood, the four last things (death, judgment, heaven, hell).

Having come to this, I’m understanding more and more your call for a wholesale return to the traditional Latin Mass and the other traditional rites. Even if the Novus Ordo is celebrated beautifully (along with Vespers at the parish, for example), it still seems that in some way we have to put back in all sorts of elements that have been removed (through homilies, catechesis, explanations, etc.). But this is incredibly laborious, never totally successful, and finally, doesn’t seem to be what the liturgy is intended to be. It should be able to do what it does just by being what it is, rather than needing constant life-support from a team of doctors.

Nowadays, when people are bored at Mass or “don’t get anything out of it,” we often ask: well, what are you bringing to it? Again, there’s some truth here, I don’t deny it. But am I right in thinking that this is fundamentally a wrong way of looking at liturgy?The liturgy is supposed to call these things out of us. We aren’t meant to simply put ourselves, by our own effort, into the proper dispositions. The liturgy is intended to draw these things from us, demand them of us.

Yours in Christ,
Parish Catechist

Dear Parish Catechist,

You have hit the proverbial nail on the head. Obviously, the rudiments of faith and catechetical knowledge are presupposed to engaging the liturgy—but the liturgy is then supposed to take that and nourish it, carry it further, like Christ multiplying the few loaves and fishes the disciples offered Him. If the liturgy is not assisting in the development of a deep interior life and a reliance on sacramental grace and an awareness of the sacred mysteries of Christ in His life, death, resurrection, and ascension, then it is simply failing in its proper work as liturgy. I talk about this in a few chapters of Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright, especially 5, 7, and 19 (online versions of which can be found here, here, and here).

The Divine Office was destroyed by the Liturgy of the Hours. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but it’s the sober truth. For the first time in the history of the Roman church, the full psalter is not recited. In the old breviary the 150 psalms are recited each week; in the LOTH, it’s not quite 150 over a month—and with plenty of verses skipped, as you know. The Anglican book, which I’m not familiar with, sounds very good. It’s clearly superior to the LOTH, and if you find it spiritually fruitful, I’d say stick with it. It’s better, all things considered, to pick one book and make it your go-to for the office than to bounce between several.

What you have described can be rephrased this way: the reformed liturgy simply lacks whole dimensions of the traditional Catholic faith—heck, whole dimenions of the Old Testament and the New Testament. So it really doesn’t matter if you add all the “smells and bells.” It’s like putting royal clothing on a starved and shivering waif. There’s a disjunct that cannot be overcome by piling up externals but only by restoring the fullness that already existed in the old rites. It seems to me plausible to believe that Divine Providence, with a “severe mercy,” permitted the “mystery of iniquity” of the liturgical revolution in order to send the most almighty wake-up call and cold shower in the history of the Church. “O my people, pay attention to the riches you have—or I will take them away.” He says this a thousand times in the Old Testament. We are still Israel journeying through the wilderness of this world en route to the Promised Land of heaven, equipped with laws and rites that we seldom perfectly observe or appreciate. He bestows what is good; He tries the hearts and reins; He chastens whom he loves; He sends into exile; but He always promises to relent, for a remnant, and He does relent, letting the sweetness of His love be tasted and seen. This is the very logic of salvation history, and we have seen it playing out before our eyes.

I have no more to add to your excellent analysis. Would that more pastors and religious educators would wake up to the sharp inadequacy of reformed means to accomplish traditional ends; would that they could turn again to what the Lord has already provided in the history of the Church, and feed the people with liturgical bread, not stones!

In Domino,

Dr. Kwasniewski

Formed in the Spirit and Power of the Traditional Latin Mass: On the Eighth Anniversary of Summorum Pontificum

In her magnificent book Cistercian Europe: Architecture of Contemplation, Terryl Kinder describes how medieval Cistercian architecture, seemingly simple and humble, is actually extremely subtle in its relationship to the cosmos and particularly the light of the sun:

What there is in a Cistercian abbey—and in abundance—is the presence and the play of light. It is sunlight that animates the buildings by day, outlining every protuberance and recession, giving full value to architectural detail. When trying to understand light in an abbey, the role of silence needs to be underlined, for speaking draws attention away from visual subtleties. In order to experience fully the movement of light and shadow in a Cisterician church, one needs to be present throughout the day from morning until evening, in winter and in summer, at dawn, when it is raining, and in the reflected light of snow. The evolving luminous effect is most apparent when one is sitting in the same stall, the very slowness of the moving light providing a perfect backdrop to contemplative life. Then the subtlety of the architecture and its detail may gradually reveal itself to those who have grown aware and can see it.[1]

In other words, you have to live patiently and attentively with this architecture before it reveals its secrets to you, and once you have learned its language, you are ushered into a world of spiritual symbolism that echoes and amplifies the longings and thoughts of your own prayer.

This example from the Middle Ages reminds me of certain striking words Pope Benedict XVI addressed to bishops in the letter accompanying the publication of Summorum Pontificum:

The fear was expressed in discussions about the awaited Motu Proprio, that the possibility of a wider use of the 1962 Missal would lead to disarray or even divisions within parish communities. This fear also strikes me as quite unfounded. The use of the old Missal presupposes a certain degree of liturgical formation and some knowledge of the Latin language; neither of these is found very often.[2]

In noting how a “certain degree of liturgical formation” and “some knowledge of Latin” are required for the usus antiquior, Pope Benedict voiced a polite but stinging critique of the paucity and superficiality of liturgical formation found among many Catholics today as well as the pathetic and scandalous lack of Latinity among the clergy, contrary to the express requirements of Canon Law.[3] It is as if he said: You need not fear a sudden disarray in the Church, since the use of the classical Roman Rite, which presupposes the very things that the original Liturgical Movement and then Vatican II called for—namely, sound liturgical formation and the retention of Latin—are hardly to be found nowadays. Things are so bad that the old Mass, with its very great goods, will not immediately be able to spring back to life and take over.

Can we not see this as an implicit critique of the Novus Ordo, which, according to its architects’ express intentions, was meant to require little in the way of formation? It was designed to be self-explanatory, an “instant liturgy” like the instant coffees and dehydrated foods popularized in the Space Age. After all, in one of the most embarrassing sentences ever consigned to the text of an ecumenical council, we read in Sacrosanctum Concilium: “The rites … should be within the people’s powers of comprehension, and normally should not require much explanation” (34).

Never mind the fact that the people’s powers of comprehension have to be deliberately formed and informed in order for anything liturgical to make sense, and never mind the fact that the mysteries into which we are thrown are permanently and unfathomably mysterious, comprehensible and explicable only to a certain point, beyond which they dazzle and humble the human mind with their unapproachable light. As Benedict XVI frequently said in his homilies, man is not naturally Christian; we are not born redeemed; we must be born anew in water and the Holy Spirit, we must receive instruction and nurture our faith all our lives. Part of this process of becoming Christian is learning assiduously the vocabulary of the sacred, the language of the supernatural, the symbolism of the liturgy.

It is true, as Guardini reminds us, that many of the signs and gestures used by the Church have their origin in the order of creation, which speaks (or can speak) to man at the level of nature. But something like making the sign of the Cross or burning incense before the Blessed Sacrament is simply not intelligible apart from catechesis. Three conclusions suggest themselves: (1) taken in its totality, the Christian liturgy is not and can never be within the sphere of the people’s powers of comprehension in the absence of “formation in the spirit and power of the liturgy,” as Sacrosanctum Concilium recognizes elsewhere (n. 14). (2) Normally, and especially for modern man who spends his life deracinated from nature and culture, the liturgy will require much explanation. (3) Lastly, the worst place to attempt to explain liturgy is within the liturgy, even though this has been the constant trend for the past 50 years.

Tools of the trade: missals for the faithful

The original Liturgical Movement wanted serious formation of the clergy and the faithful so that they could yield themselves intelligently and willingly to the profound riches of the rites handed down to us, with their ultimately impenetrable mysteriousness that was the secret of their magnetism for devout souls. The Consilium decided instead on a horizontalized and transparent meeting format in which business is conducted in a linear fashion, “no congregant left behind,” with no residue of unintelligibility, no need for outside effort or inward suffering, and no submission to cultural forms that transcend our age as God transcends the entire created order—Latin being, perhaps, the most notable symbol of such a cultural form.

In fact, it is not difficult to see a certain pattern among those who discover the traditional Latin Mass and begin to attend it regularly. As a Catholic becomes more educated in both the Roman liturgy and the spiritual life, he or she comes to find the Novus Ordo less satisfactory. One notices more and more its thin rationalism, its openings for egoism, its heavy-handed didacticism, its lack of tranquility, its surprising distance from the interior world of the great spiritual masters. The classical Roman liturgy expresses to perfection all the great themes that the spiritual masters are always pursuing, and does so with a beauty, clarity, and forcefulness that is refreshing, invigorating, and habit-forming. Juventutem chapters and Fraternity parishes will recognize immediately the phenomenon I am describing here. It seems as if young people in particular, when serious about their faith, are quick to recognize the strengths of the old and the weaknesses of the new.[4]

Whether one realizes it or not, to seek to be formed “in the spirit and power of the liturgy” is, ipso facto, to become suited for the traditional Latin Mass, prepared to benefit from the feast it spreads before us. To become more prayerful, more accustomed to meditation, is to be in motion towards the usus antiquior—at least in the best of circumstances, when this trajectory can be peacefully completed. Tragically, as with storm-tossed ships too far from shore to find a safe harbor, there are many Catholics who cannot discover our liturgical heritage because it is simply not readily available to them. They will do what they can with the poverty of prayer forms they are offered, but it will be like poor children who cannot flourish on a meager diet, or who can do so only by special divine intervention and favor, outside of the ordinary course of things.

Let us return to the lines from Pope Benedict XVI’s letter to bishops of July 7, 2007. Having quoted these very lines, a commentator then went on to say:

The extraordinary form is difficult in the way that anything that’s rewarding but exacting is difficult, like classical music when what we know is mainly popular music. At Mass in the ordinary form, we experience it as something that projects itself from the sanctuary into the pews: it meets us halfway. At Mass in the extraordinary form, “Introibo ad altare Dei,” I will go to the altar of God. In the United States, a number of Catholics higher than anyone might have predicted from a survey of Catholics worldwide prefer to do the harder thing.[5]

The classical liturgy begins, in a sense, with the inner man and works from there to the outer man. This is why it is a harder, more demanding way, a more deeply transformative way—one that is, for that very reason, more full of joy and more productive of fierce devotion. This liturgy demands of us that we be formed and educated, otherwise we can make no sense of it. It prompts the development of new faculties of seeing and hearing; it requires an exodus from our surroundings of pop culture and intellectual fashion; it calls us to a strange land, like Abram being summoned from Ur to Canaan. Latin is the intuitive symbol of this stripping of oneself and donning a new garment, fit for standing in the presence of the Lord.[6] When Latin was de facto abolished, a potent and efficacious sign of the transcendence of God (the object of worship), of man (the subject of worship), and of the activity of worship itself (the mediating sacrifice), was lost, with immensely damaging consequences.

“What there is in a Cistercian abbey—and in abundance—is the presence and the play of light.” This, indeed, is what we find in the traditional Latin Mass and throughout the Roman liturgy as a whole: the presence and play of a divine light that illuminates man’s total condition, as a sinner redeemed in Christ, destined for immortality and fighting the battle of good and evil. It is this irresistible presence and liberating play of light, worlds removed from anthropocentric spontaneity and creativity, that we have discovered in the Mass of the Ages and everything that goes with it. With a shock of joy, we have embraced that gift, or rather, yielded ourselves to it, with all the fervor of young love, the foretaste of eternal blessedness.

Architecture, liturgy, and nature in perfect harmony

NOTES

[1] Terryl N. Kinder, Cistercian Europe: Architecture of Contemplation (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans; Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000), 385–86.

[2] The full text may be found here.

[3] See Fr. John Hunwicke for the canonical requirements and kindred matters.

[4] For example, a college student wrote in an essay: “We do not immerse ourselves in the Mass [viz., the Ordinary Form] as much. It is more rushed and there is less concern with what every movement and every item means.”

[5] Nicholas Frankovich, First Things, September 26, 2013, “It’s Extraordinary.”

[6] This kind of stripping of the ego happens in the vernacular Byzantine liturgy in a variety of ways that do not have their exact parallels in the Western liturgy. But that would be another subject to pursue.